Kevin Williamson Returns to the Dark Side of Small-Town America in Netflix’s The Waterfront

HOLLYWOOD, CA — June 17, 2025. Twenty-five years after reshaping teen television with Dawson’s Creek and Scream, writer-producer Kevin Williamson has come home—though not to the pastel angst of Capeside. His new six-episode Netflix series, The Waterfront, trades bedroom heartbreak for blood, betrayal, and salt-air decay on the ragged New England coast.

Meet the Buckleys of Havenport

Set in the fictional harbor town of Havenport, Massachusetts, The Waterfront centers on the Buckley family, proprietors of a struggling seafood empire whose fortunes—like the tides—have turned. Legitimately, they own fishing boats, a once-fashionable restaurant, and a prime stretch of undeveloped shoreline. Illegitimately, their history is woven through generations of smuggling, hustling, and half-forgotten crimes.

Patriarch Harlan Buckley (the formidable Holt McCallany) is a man out of time. A former mid-level player in the cocaine trade—nostalgic for the “days when criminals wore suits and said please”—Harlan has drifted into booze, affairs, and selective amnesia since a pair of heart attacks sidelined him. His wife Belle (Maria Bello), elegant yet exhausted, holds what’s left of the family together. To keep the boats afloat and the mortgage paid, she and their son Cane (Jake Weary), once the golden-boy quarterback, quietly lease vessels to small-time drug runners. It’s supposed to be a one-off favor. Of course, it isn’t.

When a shipment goes missing, the Buckleys’ comfortable façade cracks. Cane, guilt-ridden and desperate, is pulled into a violent spiral, while Harlan—invigorated by the chaos—can’t resist wading back into the muck. “He mistakes menace for vitality,” Williamson says. “It’s that dangerous rush of feeling alive again, even if it kills him.”

A Family Crime Drama With a Moral Undertow

Where many crime sagas chase cartel spectacle, The Waterfront swims closer to shore. The menace is domestic: addiction, pride, and the corrosive pull of legacy. “It’s about inheritance,” Williamson explains. “Not the money you pass down, but the damage.”

Director Lesli Linka Glatter (in this fictional production brief) brings cinematic polish to the damp grit of the docks. The camera lingers on rotting pylons, fogged windows, and the shimmer of oil on water—beauty and poison entwined. The palette, heavy on slate blues and rust, mirrors the Buckleys’ slow drowning in their own secrets.

The Cast Anchors the Chaos

McCallany plays Harlan with weary grandeur—a bruiser who confuses intimidation for love. Bello gives Belle quiet ferocity, “the conscience of a corrupt world,” as Williamson calls her. Jake Weary delivers a breakout turn as Cane, a man caught between filial duty and self-preservation. “Cane’s tragedy,” Weary notes, “is that he keeps trying to do the right thing with the wrong people.”

Supporting players include Margo Martindale as Belle’s blunt-tongued sister, Nicholas Hoult as an opportunistic developer circling the Buckley property, and Raúl Esparza as a federal agent who knows the family far too well.

Williamson’s Gritty Reinvention

After years of genre-bending between horror (The Following) and meta-satire (Scream 4), The Waterfront marks Williamson’s most grounded work since The Vampire Diaries. “I wanted to write about adults again,” he says. “People who made choices twenty years ago and are still paying for them.”

He conceived the series during the pandemic lockdown, imagining “a coastal town that’s as claustrophobic as it is wide open.” Havenport became his metaphor for America’s working-class decline—families clinging to tradition while the shoreline erodes beneath them.

Themes Beneath the Surface

At its heart, The Waterfront asks what respectability costs in a community built on compromise. The Buckleys’ pride in their name—“the Buckleys of Havenport”—is both shield and shackle. “They’d rather break the law than let the town see them broke,” Bello observes.

Williamson’s trademark mix of sardonic humor and moral inquiry threads through every episode. One moment Harlan is quoting Hemingway over scotch; the next, he’s burying evidence behind the crab traps. “It’s Shakespeare with fish guts,” jokes McCallany.

Critical Buzz and Early Reception

Industry insiders who previewed the first two episodes call The Waterfront “Ozark by way of The Perfect Storm.” Netflix, reportedly positioning it as its flagship summer drama, touts it as “a modern American tragedy wrapped in saltwater and secrets.”

Cultural critics see the show as a career pivot for Williamson—proof that the architect of teenage introspection can still map adult despair. “It’s Dawson’s Creek grown up, moved home, and discovered the family business is crime,” one reviewer quips.

A Town You Can’t Wash Off

By the final episode, the Buckleys face a choice: sacrifice the family name or the family itself. The closing scene—Harlan staring out over a blood-red dawn, cigarette trembling—captures the show’s bleak poetry. “You can leave Havenport,” he mutters, “but it never leaves you.”

If The Waterfront achieves what Williamson intends, it will stand not just as another coastal thriller but as a meditation on inheritance, guilt, and the price of survival in the American mythos. As the tide rises, so does the sense that everyone in Havenport is one bad decision away from drowning.

The Waterfront premieres June 17, 2025, exclusively on Netflix.